I left the platform and missed my train for a very important phone conversation.
As I walked back down the stairs, tears already clinging to my eyes from the news, of course he was playing Bach.
I stood and listened to the entire cello suite, until he started packing up. He looked up and asked me if I would have wanted to hear it all again, the same one.
I said yes, that I would have never wanted it to end.
Timing is everything, and tense is important, isn’t it?
I am watching a couple slow dance precariously and laugh together while losing balance on the subway. The man sitting next to me is wearing a cowboy hat and reading Vonnegut. The sun was splitting the empty skies open with its orange before I went underground. The world will be defiant, you know, even in the face of so much confusion and despair. It remains throbbing with hope, or it (we) wouldn’t exist.
I received a message: “I’m gonna keep visiting you so… we have a lifetime.”
And it kind of felt like this avalanche came crashing down onto my deserted heart. This realization that I’ve been treating everything in my life as temporary. To protect myself. New York City does that to you. I think in hours, days, sometimes months. Everything is finite. The light, the warmth, the space, the cold, the seasons when half a pint of blueberries costs $13, the waits for the subway, the eternal pulse of the night, the snowstorms, the leaves changing, the feeling that someone loves you. The hope that someone may want your company for longer than a few hours, for more than just your body. It is so much easier to convince yourself that it is all momentary, ephemeral.
I command it to be, so that when it ends (as it inevitably will), I’ll be prepared.
I flinch at “lifetime” or “always.”
But today. “We have a lifetime” calmed everything down. Everything felt less urgent, so still. Like it was okay to believe that someone will stand in the sun with me. And keep me company while I make jam. And that the light will linger.
“…none of us can get
far enough away from each other
and none of us can get close enough.”
– Dean Young
